Using literature, documents and parliamentary debates in Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland, nine arguments for and against lowering the voting age to sixteen are distinguished and critically assessed. The assessment is based on criteria such as logical consistency and empirical validity. It is argued that most arguments can hardly be defended with these criteria. However, this does not mean that the case for lowering the voting age is weak. This would only be the case if a voting age of eighteen is considered as valuable in its own right.

Political parties normally compete in elections individually. Yet, sometimes they join forces and form pre-electoral alliances. This rather unusual strategy contains both costs and benefits. In this article we try to identify those costs and benefits by opening up the black box of internal party decision making in considering pre-electoral alliance formation. We start by assuming that parties of different electoral sizes could have different motives to face the voter as one electoral list. Through in-depth interviews at the local level in Flanders, we have studied pre-electoral alliance formation for the municipal elections in 2006. We find that the arguments of large parties mainly focus on becoming the leading formation and thus claiming the initiative in coalition formation. Small parties have more varied motives for forming or failing to form a pre-electoral alliance.

Studies of women’s representation have often explored the link between women’s descriptive and women’s substantive representation in parliament, analyzing whether female representatives bring a unique – and often feminist – contribution to the representation of women’s interests. Doing so, however, these studies have failed to consider “how women’s substantive representation actually occurs” (Celis & Childs, 2008; Childs & Krook, 2009). Recent studies therefore propose to apply a claim-based framework, leaving open how, why and by whom women’s substantive representation occurs (Celis et al., 2008). In this article, we put this new claim-based approach to the empirical test. More in particular, we consider its added value by studying the variety of claims made about women in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives (1995-2007). We conclude that a claim-based framework indeed brings additional actors and perspectives to the fore, but that there are limits as to which claims are formulated and by whom.

In this essay, I argue that the alleged failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, rather than labelling it as the collapse of climate politics, should be embraced as an essential political fact. Admittedly, Copenhagen was a failure, albeit of a populist consensual policy practice that invokes an apocalyptic doomsday scenario to make everybody toe the neo-liberal line. In my view, consensus-driven UN policy is running into its own limits as was clearly illustrated at the climate summit in Cancun (December 2010) where the blame was pinned on Bolivia for its fierce resistance against a weak agreement. The time has come to revive the climate and, by extension, the environment as a matter of genuine political concern, open to struggle and contestation, in this way constituting an essential component of social change.